Only ten Republican Senators voted against confirmation of Samantha Power to UN Ambassador on 8/1/13

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8/2/13, "Just 10 GOPs Vote Against Samantha Power’s Confirmation," PJ Media, Bridget Johnson. "The Obama confidante’s nomination sailed through" just before Senators left for five-week August recess. "Voting against Power were Sens. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), David Vitter (R-La.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.)."...

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12/22/14, "In the Land of the Possible. Samantha Power has the President’s ear. To what end?" The New Yorker, Evan Osnos

"In July 17, 2013, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee met to consider the nomination of Samantha Power to be America’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. She was an unusual choice. Although she had been a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and served on the National Security Council as the senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, she had never been a diplomat. At forty-two, she would be the youngest-ever American Ambassador to the U.N."...

(parag. 12): "To survive the questioning, Power had set aside the ferocity and independence that made her name. David Rieff, a frequent critic of Power’s humanitarian prescriptions, later derided her performance as that of an “apparatchik whose willingness to pander to her interrogators seemed to know no bounds.” 

When I asked Power about her performance, she smiled and said, “My thing in confirmation was, I can’t say anything that is not true.” If she received an awkward question, “I need to find something that is responsive, and that may just take it in a slightly different direction, but feels deeply true to me. That was what I felt I was able to do.” On August 1st, the Senate approved her nomination, by a vote of eighty-seven to ten."...

(parags. 3-5): "In a 2002 interview on “Conversations with History,” a television series filmed in Berkeley, Power described a hypothetical need for a “mammoth protection force” to police a peace accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But after she began working as an adviser on Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, in 2007, his critics quoted that interview in accusing him of harboring hostility toward Israel, and Power disavowed her comments. In a departure for a journalist, she quietly asked the host of the interview to remove the video from the Web, though portions of it still circulate online. To repair the damage, she subsequently approached Shmuley Boteach, a celebrity rabbi who ran for Congress in New Jersey, Abraham Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation League, and other prominent defenders of Israel, who endorsed her U.N. nomination. She knew that during her confirmation hearing her record, her vision of America’s role in the world, and her transformation from an activist to a political figure would receive intense scrutiny. Tom Nides, a former Deputy Secretary of State, told her that her chance of being confirmed was twenty per cent, at best.

When Power visited Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, he consulted a page of notes marked with a highlighter. She recalled, “Everything I’d ever written had just been pulled out and reduced, basically, to the things in my search that were the most cringe-worthy, things that you’d just say out of the corner of your mouth in a church basement somewhere, or whatever—they’re not your considered view.”

But Power’s ideas defy the usual partisan distinctions, and she cultivated some unlikely alliances on Capitol Hill. Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from Georgia, where Power spent much of her childhood, shared her belief that, after President Bashar al-Assad of Syria deployed chemical weapons, Obama should have attacked the regime for crossing his “red line.” Chambliss told me, “We had some frank discussions about that. She said, ‘Hey, I’m working for the President—just remember that.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know, and here’s what I hope you’ll convey to the President.’ ” Chambliss added, “She has ideas that don’t always coincide with mine from a national-security perspective, but we’re pretty darn close.” He agreed to introduce her at her hearing.  

(She now sends him notes on his birthday.)"...

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Comment: "Character" may be revealed by what a person does when he thinks no one is looking. In Ms. Power's case, a person's real views are revealed by what they say in a Church basement.